How Big Pokken Tournament DX Actually Is

The Nintendo Switch's version of Pokken Tournament DX is fast approaching its release date. The 3D fighting game based on the Pokemon franchise recently had its official digital download size revealed for those who plan on getting the game through the Nintendo eShop, and it's not quite what you may have been expecting given that it's only 3.2GB.

According to Gamespot, the game is only 3.2GB. That's about 480 megabytes smaller than the Wii U version of the game, which clocked in at 3.68GB when installed digitally from the Nintendo eShop. So if you had plans on using some of the internal storage of the Nintendo Switch set aside for Pokken Tournament DX as a digital download, you'll only need to set aside 3.2GB of free space to do so. Given that there aren't many big AAA games out and available for the Switch, this should be pretty easy.

Gamespot notes that the discrepancy in size is actually quite peculiar because the Nintendo Switch version of Pokken Tournament DX actually has far more content than the Wii U version. For instance, there are eight new support characters and five new playable characters, including Darkrai, Empoleon, Scizor, Croagunk, and Decidueye.

Each of the new Pokemon have their own special moves and abilities and are fully animated with their own audio, and yet somehow this resulted in the game being 480 megabytes smaller than the Wii U version of Pokken Tournament.

Bandai Namco even worked with Nintendo to include all new daily challenges, team battles and online group match creation, yet the developers managed to shave off almost half a gigabyte's worth of data from when the game originally launched.

Some gamers think that Bandai Namco may have compressed the textures down to 720p and opted to minimize things like audio and other non-essentials in order to squeeze the game further down in size to fit onto the Nintendo Switch with ease.

For reference, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a massive 13.4GB, which is pretty big for a Nintendo Switch title but fairly tiny for most games made for home consoles today, which range anywhere between 30GB and 60GB. For 4K titles, they often times average around 100GB, so some of those games can really ruin your bandwidth data caps.

However, if you do run out of space there's always the option of purchasing microSDXC cards for the Switch and storing the games on the memory cards in order to free up the internal storage space on the Switch.

In the case of Pokken Tournament DX, you shouldn't have to worry about running out of space since it only takes up 3.2GB, which is minuscule compared to a lot of other games released these days. On the bright side, this makes for shorter load times since there's less memory overhead required to cache or stream data packets.

If you're curious about the upcoming fighting game for the Switch, you can actually download a free demo to get a taste of the title ahead of its highly anticipated September 22nd release, where it will be available both digitally and physically for the Switch.